Because in this house, we care about publishing.

Currently, I’m working on publishing Game Boy World 1990, Vol. 1. An early proof arrived today, along with the final-final-final proof of the Retronauts Kickstarter book. When I say “early proof,” I mean it — I’ve placed all images and finalized the layout and page count, but text still needs a lot of work. The goal with this proof was to make sure the images and layout look good — and they do!

Actually, they don’t look nearly so great in these images. Much of the appeal of a book is, you know, holding it in your hands. And this book looks really good, in part because of a terrible and difficult choice I made for it: I upsized it from the 7×9″ format of Game Boy World 1989 in favor of the 8×10″ format of Good Nintentions. My initial impulse was to keep it the same size as the previous book, but… ultimately, that size isn’t optimal for this material. Game Boy World books are all about original photography and screen shots! And text, but mostly the images, because what other idiot would go to the trouble of finding all of these games, complete, including import releases? Just me. Some of these games are insanely hard to find and just as insanely expensive when you do. Until the world’s handful of obsessive Game Boy collectors decide to start documenting their collections, this is the only way you’ll see all this material in a single place. I decided to go with the larger format to better showcase the photos, and to give the text more breathing room.

When I initially put together Game Boy World 1989, I was using blurb.com for fulfillment. They make really nice books, mostly geared toward photography, and they’re very expensive.  Kurt Kalata convinced me to jump over to createspace.com as I was finishing GBW89, as his Hardcore Gaming 101 books looked fantastic and sold for much, much better prices than equivalent publications through Blurb. I produced a handful of Blurb books for GBW89, which I had to produce at the 7×9″ format to keep them affordable, then switched over to CreateSpace — and in the process, I stuck to the same size. Long story short, the original book’s size was a compromise that I no longer need to make, so rather than crowd the new book and future volumes into that compromised size, I decided to change formats.

OK! So, that kind of sucks for shelf consistency. It bugs me as much as it’ll bug anyone else. But it’s best for the books, you know? Think of the new book as the Mega Man 2 to GBW 1989‘s Mega Man: The same idea, but better, and not afraid to drop the dumb scoring system and color ball item drops for the sake of improvement.

Anyway, at some point I’ll rearrange GBW89 to the 8×10″ format. I won’t add new material to the book, because I don’t want people to feel like I’m being mercenary about it — this will simply be for anyone who wants their books to line up neatly. Anyone who doesn’t care doesn’t need to bother!

The new book should be up for sale before the first of June. I promised Patreon backers they’d get their books first, so I won’t list the new volume for sale until those are all shipped out. And that is about it for this book for now. I have to get this week’s Retronauts panel prepped and do taxes before I can think about it again.